The history of Flash games in China
chaoyang.substack.com
The history of Flash games in China
1–10 of 34 posts
Re: The history of Flash games in China
#2The main article begins with the heading "Flashing for Fun and No Profit".
Re: The history of Flash games in China
#3Had adobe freed and invested in standardizing flash, the web could be a very different place today.
Re: The history of Flash games in China
#4I still don't forgive Steve Jobs for his greed in killing Flash because he wanted to get a piece of everything iphone.
Re: The history of Flash games in China
#5I still don't forgive Steve Jobs for his greed in killing Flash because he wanted to get a piece of everything iphone.
In Steve Jobs' defense, he begged Adobe to make Flash work on iPhone like four times and they couldn't make it work.
This isn't because Flash on phones would just never work[0]; but that Adobe was unresponsive to Apple's concerns. They viewed the iPhone as "just another thing to put Flash on" rather than something that absolutely needed special attention from the Player team. And it absolutely did need special attention.
As an extra insult to injury, Adobe's CEO refused to take Steve Jobs' phone calls[1].
[0] It absolutely could; it would have required implementing hardware-accelerated video, composited animation rendering, and the conditional-tap-to-click behavior that Safari used to handle rollover menus. Instead, Adobe handed Flash developers StageVideo, Stage3D, separate touch events, and told the developers to sort it out themselves.
[1] For context, every company involved with early iPhone software was on Steve Jobs' speed dial.
Re: The history of Flash games in China
#6Had adobe freed and invested in standardizing flash, the web could be a very different place today.
From what I heard, Adobe couldn't even standardize Flash internally. Flash player was apparently internally a dozen or so Flash runtimes that everyone was afraid to touch except to cut a new version on top of the others.
Re: The history of Flash games in China
#7So fun to see Gold Miner mentioned! I built the GameRival.com site where it and many other flash games were hosted. The game was so popular it led to an integer overflow in the (unsigned) int32 primary key column of our logging table (SQL Server).
I didn't realize how insanely popular the game was until I was in Las Vegas about five years ago, and a Gold Miner rip-off game was available while drinking at the bar.
Fun story - GameRival.com actually started from an advertisement game for NASCAR on Fox. We built this silly little Flash racing game that let you "challenge" your friends to beat your high score at the end. It did so well, we decided to double down and and licensed games to launch a new property to compliment our network of original Flash animations (sites like FlowGo).
Re: The history of Flash games in China
#8Had adobe freed and invested in standardizing flash, the web could be a very different place today.
From what I heard, Adobe couldn't even standardize Flash internally. Flash player was apparently internally a dozen or so Flash runtimes that everyone was afraid to touch except to cut a new version on top of the others.
Agreed. Flash to me is a demonstration how badly managed software project (particularly when core teams were gone) can doom a promising business.
Re: The history of Flash games in China
#9Had adobe freed and invested in standardizing flash, the web could be a very different place today.
PDF only became open in 2008 and its doing pretty well.
Re: The history of Flash games in China
#10Had adobe freed and invested in standardizing flash, the web could be a very different place today.
PDF only became open in 2008 and its doing pretty well.
There was interest, or it was simple enough to allow open source implementation to flourish. Even in 2008 there was plenty highly FLOSS to create and view PDF. Flash, OTOH, was a mess.
Also, PDF specification was available since 1993: https://web.archive.org/web/20150617123515/http://acroeng.ad...